To Indigo

by Tanith Lee

  I sat on the closed seat of the lavatory and stared in despair at the two bags I’d insisted on bringing up with me – which again, I’d been permitted to do.

  I made another mental itinerary.

  My bedroom door was locked, (he must have got copies of the front door keys by taking an impression from the locks, so might anyway have a copy of this key too). But the bedroom door now was glued shut. Study, library, front room, kitchen, lavatory and bathroom were potentially open wide.

  There was very little food in the house and no phone. Apart I assumed from his own mobile, which he would still have.

  Was shampoo in the ginger ale or sink cleaner on the chicken still an option? He’d be watching out now. Doubly cautious.

  And there was the strong impression he might like me to ‘try something’. A challenge, like some move in a game of which I didn’t know the rules.

  God, what could I do?

  He let me take my time up there.

  When I came out. I’d removed the disc of Untitled and also my most important documents, and shoved them in the inside pockets of my jacket. He’d see, or suspect these stiffened shapes probably, but at least this way I could run if I ever got a chance. If he took them off me, I still could. Why hadn’t I already? I had had the chance. Not taken it.

  Did that godforsaken novel mean so much? Vilmos – Vilmos and that invented City and all that infantile quasi-gothic rubbish, a stale brain’s attempt to sparkle.

  Tidily he had cleared the chairs and other things from the hall. The armchair had been lugged back into the front room and to its accustomed place, marked ready by the imprint of its legs in the carpet. When I re-entered the kitchen I saw he’d brought in the steps from outside. As in my macabre premonition, he was sitting at the table, drinking tea.

  “I made a pot.”

  I sat down and looked at him.

  “You look tired,” he said.

  “I am, Sej. Why are you doing this?”

  “You keep asking. I keep telling. You don’t seem to absorb it.”

  “No.”

  “I like you. You interest me.”

  “Do you understand what you’re doing?”

  He smiled. “Perfectly.”

  He poured out tea; we both were to have milk. And neither of us took sugar, it seemed.

  “Have you put,” I said, “something in the tea?”

  “That’s your sort of trick.”

  My mind reassembled suddenly. “Apart from the whisky,” I said.

  He looked at me. For the first time, like a villain in 1940s Film Noir, he raised one long, black eyebrow only.

  “Sorry?”

  “I had a whisky last night and I slept – in a way I don’t usually sleep. Actually, Sej, I’d like to know what it was. That was probably the best night’s sleep I’ve had for about fifteen years.”

  And then he grinned, as he had when he played the piano like a young contemporary Liszt.

  “I think I understand. It wasn’t in the whisky, Roy. It was in the glass.”

  “Not the whisky glasses in the front room. I’d used them.”

  “No. It was a chunky glass in your kitchen cupboard. You could have put anything in it – water, Coke, take your pick.”

  “A glass. How?”

  “I broke the tablet. It’s Rohypnol, by the way. I dissolved some of it and wiped it round the bottom of the glass. Put it back on the shelf, to the front.”

  “So it could have happened any time.”

  “Truly. I wondered why you didn’t come down, when I was playing you the Gershwin, and that Chabrier piece. The Chabrier was his last composition. Sheer fireworks.”

  I said, “Yes, I half heard it. Sounded as if you had three hands.”

  A look of radiant pleasure went over his face.

  He said, “There are times, Roy, I love you. I wish you were my father.”

  I took a breath. I hadn’t tried the tea.

  Gently I said, “Am I? Tell me the truth.”

  “As I’ve said before, what do you think?”

  “I think I am not your father.”

  He shrugged.

  “Then tell me,” I said, “the name of your mother.”

  I was calm as a piece of wood. Maybe it was shock. Now he had trapped me entirely. I was letting go all I had ever been. I had to become some other person – or some intrinsic Roy. A kind of non-effusive passion was stirring in me. I can’t explain it. No doubt I was temporarily, and with some reason, mad.

  “My mother’s name.” He looked at the table. “Let me think.”

  “You wouldn’t have to think.”

  “Oh, Roy. I would. I grew up, if you can call it that, in an orphanage. Then I was fostered. I can’t recall quite when, but after I was eighteen someone showed me some clandestine paperwork. And her name was on it. But I didn’t want to know.”

  Stunned I sat there. Through my mind, irrepressibly, went an image of Maureen, abandoning her child so her well-off old man wouldn’t get angry. Had she done that?

  “It’s important,” I said. “At least, curiously enough, to me.”

  And I wondered at myself for I seemed now to be two men. One knew this situation for what it was. The other – the other, less than play along, had become engaged. But this other me also, he had his own agenda, to which I wasn’t sure I was even privy. It was as if I’d left myself below, and here he – I – sped along the high bridge above. With Sej. Most games need at least two players.

  Sej lifted his head and tipped it right back this time. He looked up at the ceiling.

  “Give me a clue,” he said.

  “First letter L. Lynda,” I said, deliberately.

  “No. That wasn’t it.”

  The tea I hadn’t drunk was cold. He had drunk his. “What about,” I hesitated. “V,” I said. “Or – J?”

  And he looked at me. “Oh, Roy,” he said. “We are going to have a wonderful time.”

  He did break in the bedroom door, later that evening. It was easy for him, as I’d have thought, although the door didn’t break open cleanly because of the glue.

  “What did you use?” he asked, sounding mildly intrigued.

  “What she did, I expect, your woman friend who fixed the bolts downstairs.”

  “I see.”

  I’d already asked him how she had managed the loosening of the top bolt. “She’s good at that kind of thing,” he said. “She has strong wrists and fingers – she plays the piano, the same as me.”

  We had had lots of little conversations by bedtime. On this, and that.

  Once I said, “So now I’m definitely your prisoner.”

  And he said, “Yes. For now.”

  We had established this because my mobile had rung faintly out on the front path. Apparently it still worked. But when I inquired if I was to be allowed to get it he said no, and that nor would he.

  It rained heavily that night anyway.

  Besides, someone might steal it, simply for its usefulness, perhaps as a free gift, for it was in no way trendy.

  I had also seen, during the afternoon, the tiny dark healing wound in the palm of Sej’s left hand.

  For one terrible moment I’d been reminded of a disgusting statue of Christ crucified – the Crucifix. He saw me see the mark. He said, “This? That’s fine. I’ll tell you about it later.”

  But I am prevaricating.

  Because I don’t want to put down the next section of my narrative.

  Perhaps absurdly, I hadn’t known I would ‘block’ at this point. In fact it isn’t a block; I know only too well what comes next.

  No one will ever see this.

  No one.

  Let me therefore, for my own sake, write it.

  6

  The second time I went to his flat, Mr C went with me.

  Brothers in our shaven baldness, we were otherwise not alike. A big man, Mr C. On this occasion he wore a grey shirt. “Which one’s the druggy you said?”

  “Flat No 2. 3A’s a possib
le as well.”

  Mr C rang the bell of No 2.

  We waited, while 5’s loud music thundered above. My companion seemed impervious.

  There was no answer. So Mr C rang No 2’s bell again, now leaning on it.

  Presently a voice blurred from the speaker.

  “Whah? Wha’ is it?”

  “Hello, sonny. I got something nice for you. What you like. You want it?”

  No 2 brightened audibly. “’S ’at Col?”

  “No. It’s his best friend.”

  “Wha’ you got?”

  “I’m not telling you through a door. You want it, come and get it. You got one minute.”

  “Hang on – don’ go – I’m opening the door – I’ll be there…” wailed No 2.

  The buzzer sounded and the door was pushed open by Mr C.

  We went in and stood there until No 2 came slithering and slipping, nearly falling, down the stairs. He was as I recalled him, nothing changed, hair, garments or stench.

  On the last lowest step he seemed to grasp that something was wrong here. He eyed Mr C, then me, then came back to Mr C.

  “I see you afore,” he finally told us both, inaccurately.

  Mr C moved.

  He was very quick, which I’d already witnessed.

  No 2 went down like a literal bag of bones. I seemed to hear them click and rattle as he landed on the floor and Mr C knelt on him. Probably I’d heard his keys.

  “Now then. We want to go and see Tina.”

  “All right – a’ right – yeah, mate, you go an’ see Tee.”

  “She up there today?” asked Mr C, grinding his knee into No 2’s ribs so he squeaked and coughed. “Sure – yeah.”

  “If you’re lying…”

  “OK. Don’ know, do I – get offa me…”

  “Oh, am I hurting you, sonny?”

  No 2 whimpered.

  “Tell you what, why don’t I let you get up and you can show us the way.”

  “He knows – the way…” accused No 2, indicating me around Mr C’s inexorable bulk.

  “Never mind. Demonstrate your good manners, son. Just lead us up. Like we was blind, eh?”

  “You ain’t,” whispered No 2. “Y’ain’t blind.”

  Mr C stood and No 2 crawled over and coughed against the floor. Then he rose and tried to sprint back up the stairs

  But Mr C tripped him and he went down with a bang on the first step, and rolled there whining, with blood on his mouth.

  Above us the music roared, but I don’t think anyone would have come to see anyway.

  “I cut me lip – why you done that – ain’t got no stuff…”

  Sobbing, No 2 guided us up the stairs, sometimes faltering and coughing, once spitting red on to the step.

  There was a resignedness to all his actions. One guessed he had been done over before.

  Nothing else happened all the way up. No 2 ignored both his own flat and 3A’s; he led us, flagging and wilting, to the top. Where no one had repaired the door of 6, 66, and it still stood ajar.

  “What a good boy you’ve been,” Mr C congratulated No 2. “Now you skitter on down to your frowsty little pen, and we’ll see what Tina’s got for us.”

  No 2 fled.

  There was obviously no chance he’d call the police. Doubtless, rather like Roy Phipps, there was really no one he could call.

  “I’ll go first.”

  I let him.

  I wasn’t entirely certain why I’d felt I had to come back, but it had nagged me all through the couple of days since I’d been here last. I’d called the number again Cart gave me, of course by then the third time I’d done it. The response was the same. The price, on this occasion, only five hundred pounds, with a discount, too, since I’d paid ahead of the delivery.

  Mr C had by now sloughed his very excellent street accent. He spoke like the well-bred Oxbridge type he apparently was. Or maybe this accent was a fake too.

  The place was as I’d seen it before. Bare, empty, untouched. I’d half expected someone, some friend from another flat, to be squatting here by now. Yet no one even seemed to have come in, despite the door’s having been undone. Then again, long ago any of them could have broken in as I had.

  Even my unreal packet lay where I’d dropped it. Mr C bent at once and picked it up. He didn’t tell me off, as Duran had done about my security, for discarding incriminatory evidence. When I’d suggested plastic gloves to Mr C he had shaken his head. “That won’t be needed, Mr Phillips, you take this flat too seriously. No cop worth his salt would give a fip.”

  Despite its phonetic resemblance to my surname, “fip” was what Mr C sometimes said for fuck. So far I’d not actually heard him swear.

  To begin with, once we were in he made sure the flat’s front door was closed off from inside. He did this by dragging the dirty unclothed mattress, unaided, in from the bedroom, and pushing it against the entry. Its passage made strange tracks through the perhaps stranger dusts of the flat.

  His search was unlike mine.

  He prised up floorboards, clipped pieces out of the plaster, skirmished behind the lavatory and took the panel off the side of the bath. He used various small tools, some unanticipated, in this work. (I’d never seen a corkscrew used as a drill before).

  I followed him, and when requested to hold something or move something, I obeyed without question.

  I’d gathered once he had been in the police, but which department, as with the cause of his leaving, was never made clear.

  The red leaf in the bedroom had already turned wan and brown. He picked it up and sniffed it with a knowing look incomprehensible to me.

  “African, you know,” he said elusively.

  Presumably he meant something the leaf had been used to conceal, or used in the preparation of. Its floral origins, even to me, still appeared English.

  Although his search was both particular and elaborate, neither did he unearth anything, to my eyes at least, unusual.

  We’d been there over an hour. No one had disturbed us (5’s music crashed on and on, an especially repellent opus demonstrably on repeat).

  “And that door to the balcony is locked?” said Mr C.

  He went to it and took a screwdriver from his pocket.

  Inserting it in the empty keyhole he tried various manoeuvres. Suddenly the door snapped, shifted, and I glimpsed the key-driven bolts lifted from their sockets. He gave the door a final twist and pull and it was open.

  Out on the balcony he looked up, then down.

  “Nothing.”

  When he was back in again, I followed him along the internal corridor once more, into the other rooms, the bathroom and bedroom and spare room.

  “Let’s try,” he said, “that fire-escape.”

  He shoved the window of the now-mattressless bedroom up. There’d been only a sort of snib to lock it.

  Putting out his head and shoulders, he craned his neck. “Ah ha.”

  He helped me out of the window and we stood on the fire-escape. The metal steps uncoiled downwards to the unkempt garden. A ginger cat, chasing something small in the undergrowth, took no notice of us.

  “Look there, Mr Phillips. And then up there.”

  Up there was the sloping roof of the house, one of the endless array of terrace roofs, all rather badly in need of re-tiling, with an independent weed or two growing out of the them, or in the tops of adjacent drainpipes.

  This roof had in it a large sloping skylight. It seemed to be made of dark polarised glass. A metal ladder was fixed directly below the skylight. The end of this ladder, not quite visible from the bedroom when the window was closed, came down to the top of the fire-escape, and was firmly bolted there.

  Somehow Mr C’s bulk had hidden the ladder from me at first, as if he had wanted to astound me, uncovering it, pointing up.

  The dark glass couldn’t even be looked at. The sun hit it blindingly, a splashed broken egg.

  A noise in the garden made me look down.

  “I h
ate cats,” said Mr C. “Vicious fips.”

  A mouse in its jaws, uncaring of censure, the ginger tom didn’t give us a second glance.

  SEVENTEEN

  After we had the tea, or he did, Sej asked me if I’d left my bags upstairs. I said nothing, which was pointless, but he didn’t press me. Instead he outlined for me what I’d packed in them, both of them. He included in the assessment what I’d also stuffed in my jacket in case I could get away.

  He was very accurate.

  He might have had X-ray eyes.

  “By the way,” he added, “you shouldn’t worry too much about documents like that. Most of them are replaceable, even a passport. Your birth certificate, or a deed poll change of name, are the worst. They moved everything out of Somerset House some while back, and now you can’t get hold of anything, I gather, unless you commute to some unheard of place well outside London, and search through the records yourself. It can take days.”

  Still, I kept quiet.

  I sat and watched him.

  “On the other hand, you’d want to keep any discs with you. They have to do, I assume, with your books. A paper copy wasn’t necessary, surely? That has to be on one of the discs. What’s on the other?”

  Again, my instinct kicked in, prompting me to answer. I’d given up trying to second guess myself as to whether this was cunning of me – or placation – or the other peculiar sense of game-playing and engagement, which he had somehow induced.

  “A future book. Not much. A pot-boiler.”

  “What’s it to be about?”

  He looked genuinely interested. But that was his way. And long ago I learned to resist the urge to spill plotlines before anyone, even the most innocuous listener. You bored them, or they ripped you off. Or both.

  As I didn’t reply, he smiled. “Some authors don’t like to discuss work in progress. You must be one. What’s the title?”

  “A working title only.”

  “Which is?”

  “Kill Me Tomorrow.”

  Unlike the sub-editor whom I’d first informed of this, and who’d instantly wanted a change to avoid Bondism, Sej had the source at once. “Ah. Desdemona as her jealous partner slays her – Kill me tomorrow – let me live tonight.” He added, throwing me, “The Irish play.”